A place of perfect safety

Risk playing this game

Keep our NHS safe. The lockdown slogan seems to have passed its sell-by date now. It’s what Matt Hancock mutters when he has run out of cognitively dissonant homilies.

Let’s place the evident strain upon the cognitive and emotional capacity of the Secretary of State for health to one side. Those are the necessary desserts of his behaviours.

In Coronaphobia, we’re taking a look at that now very recognisable cognitive behavioural condition. Not the sort of glance which accompanies the sounds of a Hyde Park corner speaker engaged in explaining the evils of 5G networks.

A long look, suffused with Respect, Understanding and the intent to provide Comfort. We’re here to embrace, not attack.

If this seemingly contradicts the opening paragraphs, it is because sympathy has limits. Hancock created the nightmare in which his obvious sleepless nights now fester. Despite being a consummate professional opportunist, he could have taken a stand in Cabinet, and resigned. From the back benches, he could have railed against insanity framed as collective responsibility. That would, by the solitary nature of the voice, have been dramatically effective. Instead he lusted for the continued responsibility of that office which is now consuming him, like a boa constrictor.

But I’d like you to be SAFE. So I’m inviting you to risk playing this thought-game with me. Is that OK? What’s the worst that can happen?

Follow this CBT Experience:

Close your eyes and breathe

·           Think of any problem, issue or concern which could happen in the future

·           It can be anything, any combination of things

·           Think of that.

·           Put a label of ‘Danger’ on what you’re think of.

·           See that danger.

Breathe: Allow any feelings about the Danger you see

·           Now, think if you can of how you could become Perfectly Safe from that Danger.

Keep breathing

·           Try other ways. Think if you can of how you could become Perfectly Safe from that Danger

OK, Relax. Come back into the room.

That was, I hope, a learning experience.

By imagining possible futures, and by attaching an emotional outcome, you entered a hyper-reality.

You can notice how, when you think of Danger, your emotions (your instincts) move you to seek Safety. Your mind sifts through possibilities, and can always find a flaw in any safety plan. Your emotions then become frustrated, and you begin to feel stress.  

Metaphorically, you enter a hall of mirrors. One distorts the other, and you become stress-situated between them. Eventually, you become frozen. Your lifelong mechanics for solving problems through the combination of emotions and thinking, breaks down.

This is how Coronaphobia works. Govt UK decided, deliberately, to threaten you with death from an “invisible killer” virus (to quote Boris Johnson’s televised speech of 10 May 2020). That threat messaging had started 2 months earlier on 23 March.

This catapulted you into hyper-reality. You understand perfectly well that just staying at home, for now, could not grant you safety forever. Even following Coronavirus Regulations to the letter, you need to go out and buy essentials. So you’re not staying at home at that time.

There is no place of safety, yet you have been told of a terrible, lethal Danger. There is no plan of safety which is without a potential flaw.

The result is that your emotions then become frustrated, and you begin to feel stress.  Then you begin to freeze, because you cannot cope with the internal conflicts.

What Govt UK did, with its deliberate threat messaging, was to leverage the Danger-Safety-Stress pattern in a way which was utterly reckless with the nation’s mental health.

To then attempt to move from direct threat messaging (which removed all self-reliance, and resulted inevitably in freezing) to self-reliant “be alert” messaging was, psychologically, absurd. You can’t chop someone’s legs off, then urge them to walk.

It’s too late to put the acid back in the battery of Govt UK. That corrosive damage is done.

But with Respect, Understanding and Comfort, we can think and feel better.

So let’s try another CBT Experience:

Close eyes and breath.

·           Feel yourself, here, now

·           Sense your place of perfect safety from anything, right here, right now

·           Allow yourself to feel that energy of safety

·           Allow it to radiate outwards from your tummy button

·           Feel your safe energy radiating and shimmering

·           Allow that energy to surround you

·           Have a go at pulsing that energy higher, and then lowering it

·           And again a few times, until you feel completely confident and in control of it

OK, Relax. Come back into the room.

That was nice, huh?

Now if someone were to ask do you feel safe? While you have that energy-sense turned on, you’d find it difficult to give a coherent answer. Because Danger and Safety are simply mirrors of each other in hyper-reality.

What you are feeling is the actual reality of your own bio-mechanical system. It’s like tuning in, focusing, and watching your heart go about its beat-by-beat business. As real as that.

Now let’s try another CBT Experience:

Close eyes and breath.

·           Sense your place of perfect safety from anything, right here, right now

·           Allow yourself to feel that energy of safety

·           Allow it to radiate outwards from your tummy button

·           Feel your safe energy radiating and shimmering

·           Allow yourself to become aware of Govt UK threat messaging about an “invisible killer” virus

·           You can hear the message, but your emotional state stays the same

·           You can investigate the message with your mind, but your sense of self is preserved in perfect safety, radiating outwards.

OK, now, walk a few steps into the future

·           You move your sense of self, preserved in that radiating power, with you

·           You can process in your mind, in your imagination, all sorts of scenarios

·           But you are able to keep calm, and think about them clearly

·           your sense of self is preserved in perfect safety, radiating outwards

OK, be there

·           hold that, hold it, keep that going

OK, Relax. Come back into the room.

You notice what happened? You started to become bored.

Not panicked, or stressed. Just bored.

You began to get the voice in your head “nothing to see here folks”. You started to need to put effort into staying in that hyper-reality. Yet before, that hyper-reality was tormenting you, like a bad radio station in your head that you desperately wanted to turn off.

There’s nothing wrong with hyper-reality. It is how we experience much of human life: in sport, argument, love, sex.

As with all those settings, you need to enter the scenario with the right psychological equipment. You need to “psych yourself up”.

Allowing yourself to feel your perfect safety, the reality of the energy which does actually make your body work, does that psyching up for you. It lets you play in hyper-reality without threatening your sense of self. For, once you allow your sense of self to feel threatened, there is no solution in hyper-reality that you can find.

Try practicing these 3 Experiences. In a short while, your sense of self becomes automatically preserved and protected. Then you can begin to make conscious life choices in reality: not in hyper-reality.